


a cat's the only cat who knows how to swing

by Sorrel



Series: everybody wants to be a cat [1]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, identity fuckery, no ship like partnership, undercover nookie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-10
Updated: 2015-12-10
Packaged: 2018-05-05 22:54:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5393312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sorrel/pseuds/Sorrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"But Whisper, man.  He's never met someone so responsive, so clever, so <i>game</i> for whatever he throws down, so quick to pick up his every mark without so much as a glance for a cue.  He keeps trying bigger and better games, just to see if she's got a limit, but if she does, he hasn't found it yet.  It's goddamn beautiful."</p><p>Our intrepid heroes go out for a night on the town, see the sights, grab a little intel.  When their fishing expedition hooks a bit more attention than expected, drastic measures are required.  And then things, as they inevitably do when you have a pair of people chronically incapable of backing down from a dare, <i>escalate.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	a cat's the only cat who knows how to swing

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still working on the next chapter of Cry Havoc, I just had to get this one off my chest first. Damn it Bethesda. We coulda had it alllll....

When it happens, Deacon's been working with Whisper for about six weeks, and it's going better than he ever could have imagined. He doesn't work with partners, as a rule. The Railroad isn't staffed well enough that they can spare people from solo work, and his line of work is usually a lot easier without any hanger's-on. But Whisper, man. He's never met someone so responsive, so clever, so _game_ for whatever he throws down, so quick to pick up his every mark without so much as a glance for a cue. He keeps trying bigger and better games, just to see if she's got a limit, but if she does, he hasn't found it yet. It's goddamn beautiful.

So there they are, that night, a month and a half into a partnership that just keeps getting better, playing a couple of young troublemakers out on the town in Goodneighbor. Deacon's wearing one of his favorite guises, a gangster named Tommy that talks fast and thinks slow, and she's dolled up to the nines, long blonde wig and a silver dress that shimmers against her dusky skin. They go wandering down into the Third Rail with his arm around her shoulders, expounding at great volume about buying some bullshit gun at some great deal, earning a couple indulgent eye-rolls from the other patrons. Whisper giggles and looks up at him with adoring blue eyes, and he settles them down at a table and gets them a bottle of the good vodka and keeps going. It doesn't take long before some drifters start clustering around, hoping for free drinks or just a smile from the pretty girl on his arm, and within the hour Deacon's got a caravan guard on the line and Whisper's reeling in a merc up from the Capital.

She gets her intel about twenty minutes before he does (she should have taken Charmer as her code name, he thinks, not for the first time), and lets the merc down easy, laughing like a wind chime and pressing close in the curve of Deacon's arm, and he pulls her tight against his side and earns a kiss on the cheek for the trouble. His own mark proves a little harder to shake once Deacon gets what he wants, the man eyeing the two of them like they're on the menu and he's got the caps to order, and Whisper downshifts smoothly, cards her long nails through his wig with one hand and starts toying with the bottom button on his open jacket with the other, pouting and slurring her words a little on the vowels.

"Tommy, is it time to go yet? I'm gettin' sleepy."

"Yeah doll, I got us a room at the Rex and everything," he says, and cups the back of her neck with one big hand, giving the guard a look that's flatly possessive. "You want me to get another round, or you want to go?"

"I wanna go," she says, and looks up at him through her lashes. "Want to go to bed."

He gives a startled, pleased laugh and lets his gaze linger over the fringe of her dress against her thighs, the curve of her breasts, the inviting tilt of her throat. "Yeah, babe, let's get to bed."

The guard looks like maybe he's going to push his luck, so Deacon stands, putting out a steadying hand when she follows him and drunkenly stumbles in her too-high heels, giggling and hanging onto his arm. "Awww, whoops!" she says, looks up at him limpidly. "You're so good to me, baby."

"'Course I am, doll, you're worth it." He tosses some caps down on the table- enough for the tab, not much in the way of a tip, Tommy's a stingy bastard- and loops his arm around her shoulders, pulls her close to his side. Under his arm, he can feel the lazy tension in her muscles, at odds with the drunken looseness of her appearance. If he had to lay odds, he'd say that most of the vodka went into the potted plant on the other side of the couch. "Let's blow this joint."

Getting up the steps is a precarious experience, or at least a good show of it. Deacon's never seen Whisper anything less than smoothly graceful, and even in her performance of drunken clumsiness she's perfectly balanced. Out into the relatively fresh night air (with a distinct charming note of urine), she leans into the bulk of him and laughs softly, turning her vodka-scented breath against his throat like she's whispering pleasurable nothings in his ear.

"You got what you needed, right?"

"You know me," he murmurs back, and she presses a kiss behind the hollow of his ear before straightening away. It makes him shiver, unexpected and entirely genuine, and he's sure she can feel it, but she doesn't say anything. Fuck.

"Hey, baby, let's take this way, it's faster," she says, and starts tugging him down a nearby alley. He lets himself be towed, protesting.

"Aw, c'mon, sweetheart, that's not safe around here," he says, but Tommy has the biggest grin ever, because he knows this isn't a shortcut. Whisper gives him a heated look.

"It won't take long," she says, and pulls him back into the alley with one last yank. They end up against the wall, him bracketed between her splayed thighs and his palms pressed against the wall on either side of her shoulders. She dimples up at him. "Hi."

In spite of their position, that grin is all Whisper, none of her cover. He lets himself grin back down at her. "What's up?"

"That caravan guard. You sure he was just after a threesome?"

He blinks at her. "I mean, he could have just wanted you- why?"

"'cause he's following us."

Deacon risks a sideways glance, and sure enough, the guard is lurking on the other side of the street, trying to find a good angle to get a look at the two of them. _Fuck._ "There's no way he knows."

"Yeah, but something pinged him," she says, and stretches up on her toes, manages to get a kiss to the underside of his jaw. The little flick of her tongue, he thinks, was entirely uncalled-for. "We're gonna have to play it out."

"Aww, Whisper, you know I'm married to my work-" he starts, but then she leans up just that little bit farther and gets her mouth on his, and he stops talking.

She's a good kisser, but then her cover would be, and Whisper doesn't allow for anything less than the best. Deacon gets one hand in her hair, careful not to pull- the pins holding on the wig aren't _that_ good- and the other on her hip, and kisses her back, keeping one eye on the alley entrance in case their erstwhile friend gets a little more adventurous. Whisper apparently gets tired of the angle and loops one wiry leg around his hip, leveraging herself up into his arms properly, and Deacon's hand on her hip slides around to her ass to hold her steady, and it's right around then that he realizes that he's hard.

_Well shit,_ he thinks, because there's no way she can't tell, pressed as close as they are, but if she's bothered by it, she doesn't give any sign, just makes a pleased little noise in the back of her throat that's damn near criminal and kisses him harder, her tongue sliding along his with a wet noise that makes heat flush down the back of his neck. _Shit,_ he thinks again, because in partnership hallmarked by doing dumb things just to see if she could keep up this is still the least professional thing he's ever done, but it's a little late now for regrets. Hard to keep them, too, with her fingers scratching at the back of his neck, the little edge of pain from her nails sending shivers down his spine.

At least he's not so bad off that he loses track of his surroundings, and when their target shifts position, looking like maybe he's going to make an approach, Deacon hoists her a little higher- _right_ against his cock, fuck everything- so that he can get his mouth next to her ear. "He's making his move."

"Guess it's time to make ours then," she murmurs back, and then in a move he'd find breathtaking even if she wasn't right up against his dick, she leverages herself back against the wall and gets her other leg up around his hip, crossing her ankles in the small of his back. He instinctively drops his other hand to her ass to support her weight- _damn, she's tiny_ \- and she makes an approving noise and wraps both arms around his neck. "C'mon, baby," she says, louder and with her cover's champagne giggle. "Take me to a real bed."

"Your wish is my command, doll," he says, and starts walking. Nobody even gives them so much as a sideways look, a gangster carrying his drunk girlfriend to the hotel, her laughing and pressing kiss after sucking kiss to the side of his throat. Damn, he loves Goodneighbor.

Feeling a little less friendly about his partner at the moment, though. "Fuckin' quit it," he says into her hair. "I'm trying to walk straight here."

"I have faith," Whisper shoots back, and starts using her teeth. Deacon grits his teeth and starts walking faster. Jesus Christ, what did he do to piss her off?

Their tail drops off about half a block from the hotel, but there's someone loitering around near the lobby that looks like he might be a brother, or a cousin, maybe. Tommy laughs expansively and flips a few caps to the receptionist. "So's I can use the elevator."

"Uh-huh," Clair says, and jerks her head to the right. "You know where it is."

In the elevator, Deacon finally manages to set her down, and Whisper leans against the opposite wall, laughing. He scowls at her.

"It's not funny."

She holds up one hand, her thumb and forefinger a couple inches apart. "It's a little funny," she says. "C'mon."

"You're heavier than you look."

"Aw, thanks. I work out, you know."

He rolls his eyes, but he can't help smiling back at her either. It _is_ kind of funny, especially now that his hard-on is starting to subside. "How bad did you mark me up?"

She goes up on tip-toe to get a look at the side of his neck. "Not too bad. And I've got stuff to cover it."

"Well, that's something."

She pouts. "Aw, baby, you gettin' ashamed of me?"

He flashes her back Tommy's smile. "Never, doll, not never not once." And then, in his own voice, he adds, "But you want to hear Dez read us the riot act about fraternization?" She arches a challenging eyebrow- Whisper is pretty much immune to shame, at least as far as he's been able to determine- so he deploys the nuclear option. "Or Carrington?"

She makes a face. She hates Carrington almost as much as he does. "Well, when you put it that way."

The elevator doors ding open a moment later, and she's back in his arms in a flash, leaning drunkenly against his side. He wraps an arm around her shoulders and leans her down the hall to their room, Tommy just a little unsteady on his feet too, fumbling the key in the lock. As soon as the door shuts, he turns to lock both bolts, then collapses back against it in exaggerated relief.

"Well, that was fun-"

Whisper's mouth on his is like getting dropped into an icy lake: part shock and part thrill, the hairs on the back of his neck standing straight up in response. His hands go instinctively to her hips, and she moans when he fucks his tongue into her mouth, melting against him like ice on a hot summer's day. His erection, almost completely gone, comes back to full stiffness so fast it leaves him dizzy.

"Fuck- fuck, Whisper," he mutters in her mouth, and manages to pull away from her by dint of straightening up to his full height, where she can't reach him. This immediately seems like something of a tactical error, because from this angle he's got an excellent view of the way her flush spills down from her throat to the small, tight curves of her breasts under the the low drape of her dress. _Jesus Christ._ " _Whisper,_ hey, what're you doing?"

She looks up at him, her lips parted on a needy pant, and her blue eyes wide with lust. "C'mon, Tommy," she murmurs. "You know what I like, baby."

There's a bare half-beat where he's not sure if he's heard her right. And then he catches the tiniest twitch of a smirk at the corner of her painted-red mouth, and he realizes what she's doing. He started the game, and she's just playing along, picking up what he laid down and running with it, the same way she always does. _Keep up,_ that smirk says, and for a wild moment he feels like he does in the field, Whisper's steady voice in his ear over the comms, the thread that spools out between them and keeps him working to her design.

If he wasn't already hard, that would do it for him, right there. As it is, he feels his cock pulse in his pants, pressed tight against her belly, and from her convulsive swallow, she can feel it too. _Fuck it,_ he thinks savagely, and lets Tommy's smirk slide down onto his face.

"Yeah, sweetheart, I got you," he says, and picks her up in one smooth motion. She gives a little shriek of surprise and clings to him, the hem of her dress riding all the way up to her hips, and he takes two steps sideways and drops them both down onto the bed. Whisper looks fucking good on her back, her thighs splayed around him, her blonde wig spread out on the mattress behind her and her breasts just a half-breath away from spilling out of her dress. "Tommy'll take care of you, doll, don't you worry."

Her pupils are blown so wide that they almost swallow the blue. "I know you will, baby," she says breathlessly, and tightens her thighs around him, pulling him flush against her. Even though the layers of his cloth between them, he can still feel the heat of her against his dick. His convulsive swallow is entirely genuine. "You're so good to me."

"About to be even better," he says, and goes to his knees on the mattress. _How to play this, how to play it…_ "What do you want, baby? You want my hands or my mouth?"

She moans and lets her head loll back, giving him a beautiful view of the long line of her throat. He imagines sliding his cock between those red lips, working it in until he can press a palm to the side of her throat and feel it. Jesus, Jesus, he can't even think. "Just you, baby," she says breathlessly. "Just fuck me."

_Oh shit._ "Yeah, sweetheart, I can do that." He can't bear the thought of pulling away long enough to get his pants off, so he doesn't bother, just undoes buttons and zipper with a few quick yanks of his free hand. She cants her head up enough so that she can see what he's doing, and then she gives a loud, startled moan and scrabbles to pull her dress up and out of the way. He pulls her panties aside so hard he can feel them tear and spares about half a second to be sorry about that- he saw what she packed for this little outing, and her closest pair of spares is back at HQ- before he feels her wet heat against his fingers and can't think about anything else. Fuck, she's soaked, and the lightest touch makes her shake and moan. She's so fucking ready.

"Fuck me, _fuck me,_ " she moans, and that's not an invitation he's going to pass up. He grabs her hips again and hauls her up into position with one hand, and she scrabbles at the covers, clenches them tight with clawed fingers as he presses the head of his dick against her and starts working his way in.

"Aww, _fuck,"_ he moans, his voice and his cover breaking for a moment, the wet heat of her burning everything else out. She's still so fucking tight around him, no foreplay and no time to loosen up, and the way she clenches down on him in helpless lust isn't helping any, except to push him a little closer to the edge. Fuck, fuck, he's halfway there already. He can't think. " _Fuck,_ baby, you feel so good."

"Oh, please, please," she begs, one hand going to his arm, just above his elbow. She's grabbing him so hard he's pretty sure she's going to leave marks. "Please, just fuck me. Please. I need it."

_Aw, Jesus._ "I'm not about to disappoint a lady," he says, and with one last thrust, manages to get himself fully seated. She immediately spasms down on him, half-coming already, and he drops forward, gets his palms flat against the mattress. "You just hang onto me, baby," he tells her, and gets one look at her wide, dazed eyes before he starts to screw into her, fast heavy thrusts that bend her almost double. She moans, one long continuous whine of breath broken only by her desperate pants for air, and then he hitches his hips a fraction higher and she hiccups and comes, silent and gasping, grabbing for him, the sheets, anything she can hang onto.

He presses his face into her throat and fucks her faster, feeling it building heavy in his balls, in the sparks racing up from the base of his spine. It's not going to be long at all, probably just about the fastest fuck of his life, and he's still trying to decide if he should be proud or ashamed of that when she gives a low, slurred whine that he can feel against his jaw and that's it, he's fucking done. He gives a surprised shout as it hits him, scrambling to pull her down tighter against his pulsing dick like she's going to try to get away, and she moans heavy and low and comes _again,_ spasming down so tight that he bites down on the curve of her throat and feels himself give another weak spurt of come. _Oh fuck, oh fuck-_

"Baby," she's murmuring, when he comes back to himself, "baby, you're so good, you make me feel so good-"

He has to close his eyes against it, the way it sends aftershocks rolling down his spine. "You're my girl," he says, in Tommy's rough drawl. Staying in character is considerably less awkward than staring at his partner and trying to figure out what the hell just happened. "I gotta treat my girl right."

She manages to get up onto her elbows, and gives him a particularly sweet smile, easy and friendly and not her cover at all. He looks down at her- wig half-askew, lipstick still perfect- and wonders if he knows her at all.

"You're so sweet," she says, and he doesn't know if she's still in character or not, doesn't know what's happening now, but before he can ask, she she leans up- he doesn't even know how she does it, pure muscle maybe, but it makes her clench down hard on his softening cock and he can't help the moan that spills out between his teeth- and presses a chaste kiss to the line of his jaw. "Mmm. Let me get cleaned up?"

He's incredibly reluctant to let her go, which is probably a bad sign that he's going to think about never, but he brushes a quick kiss against her forehead, himself or Tommy he's not even sure, and rolls off her, falling onto his back on the mattress in a move that probably looks a lot less smooth that he hopes. He runs his hands up the side of his head and knocks his wig off, rubbing his palms over the itchy stubble along the top of his head, and she sits up and stretches, giving him a look that's entirely fond and entirely her.

"You're not too damn shabby at that, you know, partner?" she says, and then gives his arm a squeeze and heads off to the bathroom before he can respond. He stares after her, flat on his back, still fully dressed with his dick hanging out of his pants, and decides that he doesn't even want to know.

It occurs to him that he's still lying on the only bed. Which is awkward, to say the least. He briefly considers going to get another room, but there's no way, especially not after the scene that they put on in the lobby. He's almost certainly good enough to leave out the back and come back in as someone else without getting noticed, especially at this hour of the night, but it'd be a stupid risk for no good reason. Whisper might forgive him for the cowardice of going out the window (though she'd never let him live it down), but she'd be a lot less sanguine about him endangering the mission over it.

_Fuck it,_ he decides. He won't let it get awkward if she won't.

By the time she comes back out of the bathroom, he's wiped himself down with a spare rag and is sitting cross-legged on the bed in his boxers, writing down a shorthand report for Dez that they'll drop with one of the tourists tomorrow on their way out of the city. The woman who comes back out looks very different than the woman who went in, a short crop of dark curls and her face scrubbed clean of makeup. She's wearing the usual white t-shirt she keeps under her armor and a pair of long johns, and he can see the knotted scars on her forearms, where something large and clawed got through her armor long before he met her. Her eyes are back to their normal friendly brown, and she yawns, scrubbing a palm over her face.

"You putting it together for Dez?"

"Yeah, just about done," he says, thrown a little off-balance by the easy normalcy of the routine. They've shared dozens of rooms and camps and former raider nests over the last six weeks, and there's not a lot of room for modesty there, but it's still bizarrely… normal. Considering. "Take a look and see if you've got anything to add."

She flops down onto the bed next to him and takes the notebook out of his hand. It took her a few weeks to learn his shorthand, but now she reads it with a quick flicker of her eyes, running her finger down the side of the page to keep pace as she goes.

"The guy's cousin- the one in the lobby?- had a scar on his jaw, here," she says, and indicates the spot with a brush of her thumb. "And he was carrying a good rifle, not some jury-rigged shit. Might be a Gunner."

Deacon grins and adds it to the end. "And here I thought you weren't paying attention."

"You know I'm always paying attention," she says absently. She yawns again and lets herself flop over backwards. "I'm exhausted."

The shirt rides up a little, revealing silvery stretch marks on her belly. He's seen them before and he knows she had a child, once. She's never told him what happened to him, or why she came to the Railroad in the first place. Deacon had never quite been able to bring himself to ask, in case she wanted to get some answers out of him in return. Or maybe because he's afraid she'd give the same kind of story to him that he'd give to her, in that situation: something elaborate and amusing and just on this side of believable and entirely fabricated.

Ah, well. Honestly's overrated.

"I can take the couch," he says, uncharacteristically hesitant. He prides himself on rolling with the punches, but he's not sure where they stand, now, and she's not giving him any cues either. There were some pretty clear lines, there- they were in character before and now they're not- but he's still thrown by how easily she seems to have put it aside. Not ten minutes ago he was _inside her,_ and now she's sprawled out on the mattress next to him, eyes closed like she's about to drop off to sleep right there. This was not how he predicted the evening was going to go.

She cracks open one eye and gives him a disbelieving look. "You goin' shy on me, partner?"

Well, if _that's_ how she's going to play it. "Aw, Whisper, you know me better than that." He shoves the pencil down through the spiral binding of the notebook and shoves both under his pillow, where he'll be able to feel it if someone comes close enough to try and take it in the night. "You going to set an alarm on your gizmo?"

She took her Pip-boy off before they left for the job, since it's a bit distinctive around these parts, and now she makes a flailing gesture at her pack, on the other side of the room. "We don't need to roll out early, do we?"

"Guess not," he says, amused, and crawls under the covers, politely leaving the spot by the wall for her. (She likes to having something solid at her back.) She's still sprawled over the end of the bed, and he prods at her side with his toes. "You gonna stay down there all night, hotshot?"

"...Maybe," she says defiantly, but a minute later the mattress dips as she hauls herself upright and crawls over to drop into the space he left for her. She takes the second blanket and wraps herself up in it like a burrito, only her eyes and her curly hair visible. "At least turn off the light."

"No problemo, boss," he says, and suits action to word. He thumps back down after he switches it off, sending a little shockwave across the mattress, and listens to her giggle as she's tossed about, a smile curling helplessly on his own mouth. It doesn't sound anything like her cover's windchime laughter, more of an ungraceful snort, but it's a sound that's grown entirely familiar to him over the last six weeks. It's the sound that lets him know that he's done good, because it's easy to get her to laugh but a lot harder to get her to mean it. It's his one honest thing.

Well, there are definitely worse ways to spend an evening, he tells himself. And she seemed pretty willing to pretend it never happened, which makes it easy on him. It was good sex, damn good sex, but the last thing he needs is to make things complicated between him and his partner, not when things are just starting to get really good. And it's not like he's got anything to give her, nothing he hasn't already handed over with a smile and lie. Better to keep it how it is.

Besides. It'll probably never happen again.

**Author's Note:**

> If I ever do continue this, the next chapter would definitely start with "It happens again."
> 
> I'm [sorrelchestnut](http://sorrelchestnut.tumblr.com/) on tumblr, come say hi!


End file.
